Traffic was an unprecedented miracle and he is only thirty minutes late. He is furious at the efficiency until he sees that Sue is already there.
The restaurant — its thick golden light, ostentatious table clothes and smoke stained ceilings — is a dinosaur: Rex remembers when he had a standing reservation here two fucking decades ago.
“I remember when I had a standing reservation here two fucking decades ago,” he says to Sue.
She tries to smile but her face is immobilized. Sue is fifty and has done that fifty-year old thing to her face. She doesn’t look young, but she doesn’t look old. She looks, simply, inhuman. He imagines her skin pinned somewhere on the back of her skull, a wadded up knot of flesh holding it all together. He imagines flicking it and watching it jiggle. This, for some strange reason, makes him hard.
He tells her this when he sits down.
“Fuck you,” she says. She is flirting. She puts her hand on his chest. Her fingernails are glossed to perfection and culminate in flawless white tips. They’re the fingertips of a twenty-year old but are attached to a hand spidered with deep blue veins and wrinkles that no surgery has been invented to fix. This juxtaposition makes him so hard he worries his pants will tear off.
He tells her this too.
“Same old Rex,” she says. “Good to see the big time hasn’t changed you.”
There is a confidence in her voice which he finds denigrating. He goes to half-mast, tells her this and then, when the waiter comes and Sue remarks that lunch is on her, he is hopelessly flaccid. It is only when he blithely orders the most expensive thing on the menu, not bothering to see what it is and Sue flinches, that his penis twitches and he feels himself once again.
“So,” he says and looks into her eyes. “What have you got for me?”
Rex though, already knows what she has for him. Everyone knows.
Sue, and her producing career are coming to an end. The ten years of money hemorrhaging, arthouse trash whose deficits were wiped clean by the one superhero franchise she had miraculously stumbled into have caught up to her. Her decade of cover stories, pantsuits and captions proclaiming her the “Queen of Arthouse” and the saviour of cinema is over. Sue is bleeding money like someone stuck an artery and she’s trying to offload the last of her mid-budget adult oriented fare and hold on to some semblance of a career.
The movie is a turd. Rex remembers when it came across his slate the first time. Geriatric director, aging female star. Box office poison. The whole thing – its important message, relevant subject matter and intelligent script – disturbed Rex. It gave him a disorienting sense that he had been thrust back in time to the nineties.
“It’s a deal, for you. I just need ten-million to make my nut. I am willing to take the loss on money spent. I’m confident this is a great picture Rex, honestly, regardless of what you think of its commercial prospects, which I do think are viable. We could position it for November release. We can run Lisette in supporting.”
Rex presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. He has found he can nap in this position and people mistake it for quiet contemplation.
He wakes a few moments later when the meal arrives.
It is a neolithic steak and two full lobsters drowning in butter. The stench alone nearly gives him a heart attack so he slides it out of the way and starts to pick the tomatoes out of Sue’s caprese salad. Her face makes an expression he either cannot read or it cannot make.
“I like it,” he says, her gaze disturbing him.
“The salad?”
“The movie.”
She tenses. A very Hollywood look: the expression of getting exactly what you want, of your dreams finally coming true tempered only by the good-sense that you are being completely and ruthlessly fucked.
“We’re buying it.”
“You are?”
“Not for ten million.”
This seems to relax her. She’s too smart to think he’d actually help.
“I give nothing up front.”
“So what then?”
“I guarantee twenty million for p and a. I guarantee a wide release of at least 3000 screens for the first month. You collect seventy-five percent of the first dollar gross until you recoup the ten, then, the deal flips to me, ninety-ten.”
She works the deal around in her mind. “You believe in it?”
“You don’t?” Rex asks.
She studies him. She is trying to find the angle. Rex shows her the contract. Sue reads it slowly. Rex picks out the boccini from her caprese salad.
Sue re-reads the contract.
Rex checks his phone.
Sue nods and takes out her pen. She does her best to remain composed.
Rex does his best not to laugh in her face.
–
Rex is just twenty-two. One year out of Harvard; three months out the mailroom and already given a seat at the table. His rise is fucking imminent. He follows the conversation with a laser focus: his eyes track the words like he’s watching a tennis match. He isn’t listening, not consciously, the content flitters in and out of his head. He is only looking for signs of weakness. A voice quiver, a moment of hesitation, a moment of kindness: he will attack, kill and make his immenent fucking rise all the more imminent.
Forty-three minutes in, it happens. There is a stunned silence in its aftermath. Awe. Respect. Fear. The room watches Rex like the crowd at an execution.
And then Sue.
“Who,” she says pausing to chuckle, “taught the puppy how to talk?”
Laughter follows. The name puppy sticks. He is given a dog collar for Christmas. Not even custom made, just bought from the dollar store, his name already engraved on it. It is ten years before no one dares utter the name Puppy in his presence. Ten years and lots of bodies. All, except one.
–
“Okay,” Sue says. She reads the contract once more, slides her salad over to Rex. “Okay then.”
She signs.
Rex takes it, double checks, folds it up and slides it into his suit pocket.
Two slight wrinkles form near her cheeks: a smile Rex thinks. He returns it.
“Now listen to me you naive whore.”
Sue raises an eyebrow: is this flirting?
“I’m gonna bury this thing.”
She clears her throat. “Rex?”
“I’m dumping it in March. Setting it on fire. You will collect exactly zero dollars. Your career, your life, will be over.”
”But,” still wondering it this is a joke, still trying to play along, “You just spent…millions Rex…”
“I spent it on you soul you dumb fucking cunt.”
Sue is speechless.
Rex is hard.
He tells her this.
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s the problem with teaching a puppy how to talk.”
“I,” she pauses in genuine shock. “What?”
Rex is taken aback by the surprise. The true, complete, confusion. It is her starkly, honest bewilderment that makes him remember.
Not Sue, but Demo Rinaldi. Not a woman, but a fat Greek fuck. Not alive, but long long dead. Not living free, but already avenged. Rex, at his funeral, just minutes before his family came to pay their final respects, pissed on the coffin, one leg up in the air like a puppy. How he forgets this, he does not know. How he mistakes Sue, who he now remembers was not there, who is a quarter of the size, whom he actually likes as a person, for that ratfuck Demo he does not know.
He begins to giggle.
“Rex?”
She is so bewildered he can’t stop laughing.
“Rex what’s happening?”
He feels genuinely bad, which makes him laugh all the more.
“Rex?”
He thinks of how it is too late to stop this, too late to explain any of this without making himself look like an absolute fucking idiot. He thinks of the fact he’ll have to crush Sue for no reason at all and he begins to howl.
“I’m sorry,” he laughs. “I’m really fucking sorry.”